


been down that road before

by healingmirth



Category: The Breakfast Club (1985)
Genre: Future Fic, Gen, High School Reunion, Post-Canon, Pre-Relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-20
Updated: 2014-12-20
Packaged: 2018-03-02 08:58:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,838
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2806868
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/healingmirth/pseuds/healingmirth
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Scenes from a reunion</p>
            </blockquote>





	been down that road before

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Lasha](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lasha/gifts).



> So, this did not go quite the direction I thought it would when I started writing, no matter how much I fussed with it. But I hope I've been able to give you something like what you wanted to see from our grown-up Breakfast Club.
> 
> Happy yuletide!

Shermer High had never looked more soulless than it did by the sodium lights of the parking lot at night. It wasn't all that cold, not anything like real cold, and certainly not for Illinois, but that didn't stop Brian from blowing into his hands to warm them. 

It felt like it'd been summer just the day before, and he'd left his coat in the hotel. As he'd gotten older, he hadn't been sure whether seasons flying by was time speeding up like people always talked about, or if it was just his complete inability to pay attention to the weather. Whatever the reason, he wasn't anywhere near ready to bundle up for winter, and he hadn't. It didn't make for comfortable standing around in parking lots. 

According to the enthusiastically-worded evite, if he walked through the double doors facing him, he'd find a gym decorated just like their prom had been. It wasn't much of an enticement. 25 years ago, "Heaven" had included a lot more balloons than Brian had imagined, and a distinctly Lisa Frank aesthetic. He'd leaned against a wall at one point, and then worried that the glitter ground into the fabric was going to affect the cleaning deposit on his rented tux. His prom date, Marcy... Marcy somethingorother, had been the much cooler cousin of a friend from the math club, and he'd been so mortified about bringing her to a dance that looked like his kid sister had planned it. He couldn't remember her last name, but he knew she was from Battle Creek because he hadn't been able to think of anything to say besides asking her questions about cereal. 

Brian had to hope that the adult version of their prom committee would have a little more restraint, but at least now he knew that a roll of masking tape would get the worst of the glitter off of his sport coat and slacks, if it came to that. Now he knew that he could count on the people he knew from college and beyond to laugh with him at any terrible pictures.

There were a few couples walking in from the parking lot, all parked closer to the sidewalk than Brian had, and no one whose name he was certain of. They mutually avoided eye contact while out in the open, and after a quick glance behind him to make sure he wasn't going out of the frying pan and into the fire, Brian pulled aside before the doors with an apologetic glance at his phone. Like, sorry, former All-State basketball star, I would love to get an early start to our inevitable awkward chat; I just _really_ need to answer this text.

* * *

The decorations weren't terrible, which was the most he could say for them, but then he doubted that anyone in the room really cared like they had twenty-five years before. The pendulum had swung fully from psychedelic over to monotone. He supposed that he could thank Muffy for that - Muffy Danvers now. She was married to a bond trader, which Brian only knew because he'd stupidly accepted her friend request on facebook, and it had all been a downward spiral from there. 

Muffy was the self-appointed head of the reunion committee. Brian couldn't remember who the prom queen had been, much less who was on the committee, to know whether this was Muffy redeeming herself or trying to fix someone else's mistake. Ironic, though, that the activities with the pull to use school property for their events got stuck in the shitty facilities. Brian remembered thinking that all the balloon arches in the world wouldn't make their gymnasium measure up against the banquet hall at the Hilton, and the gym had aged as poorly as the rest of the building.

Brian scanned the room for anyone he wanted to talk to, realizing anew how unprepared he was for casual socializing without a date or a colleague by his side. If he couldn't find a person to stand with, he at least needed to find a place to stand, which meant the bar, since the only food out was circulating the room via waiter.

He got a tumbler of bourbon, propped himself up on one of the high tables surrounding the bar, and started to look for a way to use the time to his advantage.

* * *

Some folks looked great, some folks looked awful, some had possibly been replaced by better-looking or more interesting actors hired to replace them for the night, and Brian was already tired of it. By the time he'd been there an hour, Brian'd had a couple drinks, learned to talk about his career with progressively shorter words and less detail, as he watched people's eyes glaze over, and commiserated and celebrated with people on the states of their marriages. He was on his third conversation about the Bears with a car salesman, which had to be statistically improbable, and he'd given up on doing anything but grunting his agreement while he scanned the room for a better prospect. He found his excuse thanks to two women gossiping behind him.

"She didn't even graduate with us," one griped. "She was in _Night School_."

He turned to see where they were looking and found an unmistakable head of red hair.

"Excuse me," he said, but Charlie Novak had already trapped someone else into his dissection of the Bears' offensive line, so Brian just walked over to tap Claire on the shoulder.

Claire looked back at him for a moment, blank and vaguely confused, but then she looked down at his nametag and her eyes went wide. She covered her gasp with her hands, and then flung her arms out to hug him, all before Brian recovered from that first uneasy swoop of having been forgotten. "Oh my God, look at you!" she cooed. It wasn't far off from how everyone else had reacted to him, but something about how Claire said it reminded him of his favorite aunt.

* * *

Brian's phone buzzed, then buzzed again, and then another cluster a minute after that. And then another thirty seconds later. He didn't think it was audible over the music, so at least it was only annoying him, and not everyone around him like it might have at the office in the middle of the day.

He finally had to hold his hand up to interrupt Claire. "I'm sorry, this is so rude, but I just need to make sure someone hasn't died before my leg goes numb."

By the time he'd pulled his phone free of his pocket, the lock screen was full to overflowing with text notifications.

_mom wont let me go out_

_please tell mom i can go out with jennie_

_she doesnt believe that you know her parents_

_i hate her, shes so capricious_

_capricious_ was at least a step up from _such a bitch_ , even if the usage could use some fine tuning. This was where his life was, being grateful that his daughter had progressed to using SAT words to insult her mother. At least it was nothing that couldn't wait until the next time he took a trip to the bar, or if it turned out that he needed an escape from the conversation after all.

"Sorry," Brian said. "My daughter. She's great, but she's a teenager and she's with her mom this weekend, and. Well, you know how that goes wrong sometimes I'm sure. Thank god for unlimited texting, I guess."

Claire made a sympathetic noise, and hadn't yet looked over his shoulder to see if there was a better prospect standing behind him. "Rough patch? Or..."

"She grew up in a really small town," Brian said. "My ex-wife and her parents, same house all eighteen years before college, and I don't think she ever learned to trust Boston. Or me, as it turned out." He shrugged. He'd come to realize that it was probably the best he could have expected. "She agreed to come stay at my place this weekend so that Janey could be near her school friends, but it doesn't seem to be going well."

"Oh, trust me, I remember those years," Claire said. "God, I'm glad they're over."

"Crap," he said. "I didn't even ask - you must think I'm such an asshole! How's your kid. Shit, how's everything, what's going on with you?"

Claire laughed then, and it was less brittle than the one in his memories. "He's fine, they're all fine. You're actually the first person who's been able to think of a conversation that didn't lead off with, 'so, what's happened since you got knocked up?' so that was nice."

Of course once she'd said it, all of Brian's well-practiced networking small-talk fled his brain. "So..." he said. "What _has_ happened since you got knocked up? You look _great_." He hoped his smile was wide and goofy enough that Claire would believe he was still on her side.

***

Brian hadn't actually been to any of his other reunions, too busy struggling to make today work to be bothered with nostalgia. And then facebook happened, and he found himself drowning in a sea of pictures of kids whose parents he had, honestly, never really liked. It didn't make him long to see them, but it added a spice of immediacy to his idle curiosity. He could swing by home, check in on his parents, and spend four hours storing up mental notes about his supposed peers, and then never see them ever again. 

"Oh! You should totally go!" his sister had said. She'd been to a high school reunion every five years like clockwork since she'd first been out of college at Northwestern. Proximity hadn't dulled her interest. "It's so much fun to see people," she said. "You should totally go." Somehow she never remembered that his high school experience was nothing like hers had been.

If nothing else, it was nice to have Claire on his side, watching their classmates with a wary eye.

"Oh, I went to the five-year," she said. "Fuck, what a mistake that was. Open bar, we were at that place on Willow, where the Buffalo Wild Wings is now? I got a little drunk, hooked up with Chad Nelson - you remember him, right? The guy with the, oh you remember," she said, waving one hand over her head, "he had that spiky blond hair? And when we got out to his car, he said 'hey, you're on the pill now right? Cause I can't afford to have a kid for at least another five years." So I said, "You know what? no," and he thought I meant no, I wasn't on birth control, not no I wasn't going to fuck him, so looks me over again and he goes, "I guess I could do you in the ass."

She paused, and Brian was pretty sure he was meant to say something, or, Jesus, laugh. Anything, but all he could do was stare at her in horror over humanity. It'd been Thanksgiving weekend, that reunion, and Brian had been working, saving up his vacation for Christmas.

"Fuck, what a disaster that was. My husband was hoping he'd be here tonight."

Belatedly, Brian looked down, and Claire did indeed have a wedding ring on, subtle but not at all invisible. She caught him at it and raised her hand up next to her face, waggling her fingers like a newlywed to show it off.

"Yeah, married now," she said. "Three years. He's pretty great."

When Claire smiled again, it lit up her whole face - not like she wasn't already gorgeous, because she always had been, but she looked really happy, in a way Brian wasn't sure he'd ever seen her.

"My husband, Gary, he said he thought it'd be good for me, but then he refused to fly in. I think he just wanted me to come back with stories about how awful and Midwestern everyone is now." She laughed again. "God, he's such an asshole about everyone I knew in Shermer. It's amazing."

* * *

Standing by the bar had been a great plan, but it didn't take long before it also meant that Brian needed to break free from his conversation with Claire to go piss. He took a few steps before he realized he was headed towards the locker rooms on some buried instinct, and turned around to head towards one of the restrooms out in the hall. He pulled his phone back out of his pocket as he walked, less to really check in with his daughter than to avoid striking up a conversation until he'd relieved his bladder. It seemed that she'd quieted down - so either she'd gotten her way, or given up on him. He'd find out when he got home, he supposed. 

Instead, he took a scan through his inbox, swiping out the accumulated junk mail until he got back to close of business and the message from the lead designer in his group that he hadn't wanted to deal with earlier. He was so occupied with squinting at the attachments on the tiny screen that he nearly walked right into the guy exiting the men's room.

"Holy shit," Brian gasped out. He nearly apologized for his language on reflex, but kept his mouth shut.

He wasn't wearing a name tag, but there was no question that it was John god-damned Bender, live and in color, standing in the doorway of a Shermer High restroom, between Brian and the row of urinals.

John smirked, the expression that had always looked more at home on his face than on anyone's who Brian had met since; he had his hands shoved in his pockets, the same open, vaguely challenging body language that had haunted Brian's sleep longer than anything else from Shermer. "Excuse me for asking," he drawled, "but it's been a long time since I had to speak Dweeb. Is that a good sound or a bad one?"

Truth be told, Brian wasn't sure, so he just stuck his hand out to shake, and breathed a tiny bit easier when their hands met in a firm-but-not-crushing grip. It'd been a long time since he'd worried someone was going to pick a fight with him - it'd been a long time since he was anxious about a lot of things - but if anyone was going to cause trouble, Brian's money would probably always be on Bender. It wasn't rational, but there it was. Brian chuckled at his own reaction, and hoped it didn't make him seem crazy.

"Shit, I don't know," he said. "Sorry I almost knocked you over."

"Don't take this the wrong way, Bri, but I don't think that's ever been likely." Brian had held onto the few inches of height that he'd had over John by graduation, but if anything, John had gotten solider over the years since. He was probably right, in terms of pure physics. 

It was hard to say how much of an effort John was making compared to his daily life, but he'd made more of a nod to propriety than Brian would have expected, in a neat button-down and a dark tie, wool slacks that fit him well. The Docs on his feet were less of a surprise, but they looked well cared for. He had a tattoo wrapping around his right forearm, maybe a snake, but Brian didn't want to look long enough to get caught staring, not until he'd had a few more minutes. Brian had never gotten a chance to learn his way around John's quicksilver temper. 

That said, if there was anyone who Brian probably shouldn't censor himself around, it had to be John Bender, so rather than stand there, on the edge of dancing around like a little kid, he just told John that he really had to piss. "Stick around, though, man. Seriously." 

John stepped out of the way, with half a formal wave to escort Brian through the door.

* * *

When Brian got back to the hallway, John was still there, rocking back on his heels as he inspected the trophy case opposite them. "You think Andy's in here somewhere? I can't remember if he won the sort of stuff they engrave your name on, but I don't see any statues of two dudes groping each other."

Brian remembered, not with any visceral sense like he had for John, but with the corner of his brain that still sheltered baseball statistics and rushing records. Andy had won his weight class in the county, but not the state. It hadn't hurt his scholarship. He'd escaped off to school just like Brian had, only earlier because of some pre-season training, and Brian hadn't seen him since. He wasn't friends with Muffy on Facebook. Brian had checked.

"Probably somewhere, yeah," he said. "It's the same case they had when we were in school; they must have moved some of the old stuff out."

It was definitely shaping up to be the least interesting conversation Brian'd had since arriving. He would have thought that it'd be tough to find two people who cared less about decades-old sports than he and John did.

He gestured back towards the gym entrance, where Susie Arnold was chatting at the check-in table, and paying the two of them zero attention. John pivoted to walk alongside Brian, which limited Brian's ability to watch as they walked. As much as he didn't want to keep standing around in front of trophy cases, he definitely wanted to be standing still somewhere and talking. The full John Bender experience, he thought, that was an idea that John himself would probably still endorse. Instead, Brian had scattered glances at his profile, and small talk. In five minutes time, John would have gotten basically the same version of Brian's life story as Claire had, maybe with less commiserating about kids. If they ended up talking about the Bears, Brian might still need to gnaw his own arm off to get away.

Still, a bit of small talk was necessary. "What's up with you now? Did you drive in?"

"Yeah," John said. "Just this afternoon."

"Oh?"

"Yeah, I'm teaching high school over in Rockford," John said. 

Brian's feet stopped moving, entirely without the permission of his brain. "Shit, really?"

John turned back to look at him and shrugged. "Y'know what they say, pays the bills. Keeps my dog in kibble, or whatever."

John looked back at Brian with a flat stare that Vernon himself would have envied, and then with a sharp crack he was laughing, head tipped back, hand on his stomach like he was trying to hold himself together.

"Fuckin' hell, man, can you imagine that? Shit, no." John bent over, nearly wheezing, eyes watering with the force of his laughter, until he hooted and dragged a hand across his face. Brian wondered if he still smoked. "I was going to try to sell people on that, but I don't think even I can bullshit that hard." Susie was watching them with interest now, but not enough to stand up and initiate a conversation with John Bender, not like she had when Brian had walked in. Weird that anyone could be that snooty, that long, but that was Shermer for you. 

"So, not shaping young minds..."

"Oh, I'm still doing that, believe me. Got the dog too, she's great." John puffed out one more laugh and grinned, all teeth. "I've got this house-painting business now. Employing all sorts of delinquents, dudes with terrible neck tattoos and, like, septum rings. Those giant fuckin' tunnels that kids are putting in their ears now. Scaring the homeowners and then making them eat their words. The dog, she's part pitbull, sweet as can be." His grin stayed sharp, shark-like. "It's fucking amazing."

"That sounds awesome, man." He could picture Bender outdoors somewhere, windblown, rumpled, spattered with paint. Doing just what he wanted, but getting paid for it, too. "That's really, really great. Fuck, I can't believe you're here."

"Shit, man, there are some days that I can barely believe I'm not dead, you know? Muffy seemed pretty surprised when I called to RSVP, too, so I don't think it was just me. She mailed a letter to my Mom's house, probably hoped she'd done her duty but that I'd never get it."

"But you came anyway, huh?"

"I'm sure I've spent a stupider fifty bucks this month. I gotta say, though, I'm not sure what else is going to measure up to this right here," he said, gesturing between them. "The one and only Brian Johnson, all grown up and in the flesh."

Susie was now staring pointedly at her phone. Brian couldn't blame her, having done just the same thing minutes before as he passed her, and at least she looked up with a polite smile as they approached.

"Well, you made it this far," Brian said. "You have to go in."

"I don't _have_ to do anything," John said. "But I will." John slapped on his nametag, and didn't make a comment about Susie's breasts, which, while it was a staggeringly low bar, was more than he'd managed when they were in school.

John let out a low whistle as he passed through the door, which was when Brian remembered the decorations. If John was any good as a house painter, he probably had some opinions about color schemes, and they probably came down against robin's egg blue as far as the eye could see. The only description for the decor was that there was a lot of it. A lot.

"I'm not sure that a color has ever made me ill before, but this might do it," John said. "Paint fumes, absolutely, but not just the choice."

"It's not that... bad." Brian said. He was sure that Muffy had worked really hard at it, at any rate, which was almost the same thing as it not being terrible. It couldn't be easy to find so many different things in the same shade. Maybe she'd had to special order.

"I think I might need to go listen to some Swedish death metal," John said. "Or. Fuck, I don't know. I just don't think I can stand in here with a straight face."

They stood near the door like that for a minute more while John scanned the room. His had been one of the last tags on the table, so the room was filled with clusters of people chatting over top of the greatest hits of the 80s that pumped out of the speakers set in front of the folded-up bleachers. Brian didn't have any real desire to wade back into it, and John didn't look much more interested. He had to see, if not these exact people, folks like them every day. If the nostalgia had already worn thin for Brian, he could only imagine how John felt. 

Brian's best argument for staying was to catch up some more with Claire, but when he pointed her out, John froze up, then looked over his shoulder like he was planning his escape.

"I don't," John said. "I don't, uh. Yeah, I don't think that's a good idea tonight."

"Nah, man, come on. She'd love to see you, we had a good chat earlier."

"Trust me, it's not a good idea," John said. "Look if you want to, y'know. You should. You two have a good time. I'll just-"

"Wait," Brian said. Claire looked deep in friendly conversation with a dark-haired woman. He felt a little guilty about not going back to her, but he didn't want to interrupt just to say goodbye and risk losing John as well. "I've got a room at the Hilton," he said. He realized, at John's expression, an instant too late how that might have sounded. "I'm staying there, I mean, and I've got these passes for comped drinks at the bar. If you're not going to stick around to get the booze you paid for here, you can at least help me drink the booze back at my hotel."

John turned his face from the crowd to look directly at Brian, one eyebrow cocked up. "I know you've got a deep emotional bond with the hospitality of our local hotels, but if you do want to get out of here, I think I've got a better idea."

The bar at the Hilton, when Brian had stopped to check it out, had the same look to it as every other hotel bar he had seen in the past fifteen years. Lots of burgundy and dark wood, polished rails and glass. Clean, corporate, and completely empty. He could see why John didn't want to be there.

"Okay," Brian said. "What's your better idea?"

* * *

After a brief negotiation, they ended up in John's truck, headed towards a bar and BBQ place that Brian had never heard of but John assured him wouldn't just be full of gold coasters chasing the latest trend.

There was still a late dinner crew at the tables, but the bar crowd was starting to take over. There were a few guys there who looked like they'd been drinking since noon, but in that way that you could still pull off in your 20s, not the way it would have looked on Brian if he'd tried it.

Once they had a spot at the bar, there was a college football game on the screen behind John - someone in orange vs someone in white, but whenever they'd been handing out the ability to give a shit about NCAA athletics, Brian had been busy doing something else. It gave him somewhere to look when he needed a break for a second, though.

John seemed to have softened a little bit around the edges, but being watched by him wasn't any less intense than Brian remembered. It made Brian want to impress him in a stupid, teenaged way - to say something to make him laugh, to offer an observation or prompt a story about the years between their last meeting and this one. Or just to whine about being middle-aged, which John seemed happy enough to play along with, one-upping each other in their faux decrepitude.

"Shit, man. You know how it is, you get old, you get slow. I don't know why I thought I'd be married forever, but I never thought I'd be-" 

"Old and horny?"

Brian scrubbed at his hair and took a sip of his beer. It wasn't _false_ , even if he might not have used those words. "Alone," he said. "The last time I dated someone new, I was 20. It's like living in a bad sitcom. Forget turning into your parents. Some days I think I might be turning into my grandparents."

"Well, I'd still do you," John said. "If you promised you wouldn't start groaning on about your sciatica in the middle of it."

And that. That wasn't something John Bender would have said, 25 years before. He hadn't spit it out like a challenge, just as a casual statement of fact. Was this how the movies went? Turned everything on its head, you found your long-lost crush at your reunion and lived happily ever after? Only John wasn't that to Brian, and Brian didn't think he'd been that to John.

The thing was, just sitting there, across from John - maybe it was sitting across from anyone, it was hard to say. It was just really fucking nice, and he didn't want it to end. Somewhere along the way, Brian had stopped having friends. He had people he liked in the office, and fellow parents who he was happy to chat with, and links to articles from classmates, but everyone else had just faded away. Busy probably. It was a little pathetic that he'd had to come back to Shermer to find a connection, where he'd never had friends so much as acquaintances. 

"No sciatica yet," he said. "Just a bad knee." 

John barked out a laugh. "Nice one, old man. Please, _please_ tell me you blew it out playing squash."

"Fuck you, squash." Brian said.

John was leaned back against the bar, propped up on his elbows, hands relaxed, waiting for what, Brian had no idea. "Well?" he prompted. "There must be a story. If there's a battle wound, dudes always have a story."

"Ultimate Frisbee, actually," Brian mumbled. "Grad school."

John gasped, and clutched at some imaginary pearls. "Young Brian Johnson, engaging in a sporting event?"

Brian just flipped him off and took another sip of his beer.

John pushed at his shoulder, like maybe he thought Brian would just crumple to the ground with enough pressure. "So I need to be careful with you, is that it?"

"Unless you're gonna have me running an obstacle course around the bar, I'm fine. Aches when it's cold, or rainy, or I'm having a shitty day."

"Well it's not raining, and it's not cold," John said, "so are you having a shitty day?"

"No," Brian said. "Not at all."


End file.
